Watch out! Smartphone ‘zombies’ about
A Japanese experiment proves that ‘zoning out’ on mobiles while walking in a crowd poses accident risk
‘Distracted pedestrians rarely seemed to access the visual cues around them. Therefore, they might fail to execute collision avoidance behaviour in advance’
ANYONE who has tried to fight their way down a busy high street could attest to this fact: just a few people checking their mobiles on a crowded pavement is enough to cause chaos.
Scientists put the “smartphone zombie” theory to the test and found that anybody distracted by their phone was neither keeping tabs on people ahead of them nor anticipating the behaviour of others. This means the entire crowd is forced to move in a haphazard manner.
The study by the University of Tokyo and Nagaoka University of Technology divided a crowd of people into two groups of 27, who were then asked to walk at each other head-on. One of the groups wore yellow beanie hats and the other wore red ones – making it easy to see in which direction pedestrians were trying to move. Aerial cameras tracked their routes and speeds.
A control experiment was conducted, with no one looking at phones. It resulted in the efficient and smooth passing procedure that the scientists dubbed “lane formation”. This behaviour suggests that most people fall into a follow-the-leader system and allow those at the front of their crowd direction to quickly anticipate the movements of those coming the other way.
The scientists then gave phones to three pedestrians at the back of the crowd. Despite not paying full attention, they could still move seamlessly through oncoming pedestrian traffic by staying close to the person in front of them. In a third scenario, pedestrians at the front of the group were then given phones – which produced a rather different effect.
A far cry from the neat lane formation system observed in the first two scenarios, the lack of a focused group leader negotiating the oncoming walkers led to a “jumbled mess” of people moving in haphazard directions.
This was the case even when people in the oncoming group were entirely focused – illustrating just a few texting pedestrians moving in one direction can wreak havoc on pavements.
Commenting on the study, Mehdi Moussaid, from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said the experiment was “remarkable in the sense that it highlights the important role of a previously ignored aspect – the attention of the pedestrians – on the formation of a collective pattern”.
“At the scale of a single individual, the effect is minor,” he said. “But when looking at the collective, this behaviour creates significant perturbation of the pattern. It’s interesting to notice how just a few individuals can affect the collective.”
Scientists say the next step is to use eye-tracking technology to establish where pedestrians are looking when they fall into these patterns. They also want to study whether different countries exhibit different walking cultures in their cities.
The study, published in the journal Science Advances, said: “Distracted walking has become such a major cause of pedestrian accidents that many researchers have begun to investigate the influence of mobile phone distraction, especially on the behaviour of a single pedestrian at a crossing.
“Pedestrians who are able to anticipate neighbours’ motions can avoid collisions in advance. It would not be unusual if distracted pedestrians performed emergency avoidance movements because they were unaware of oncoming people.
“Moreover, it is known that humans are notoriously bad at walking in a straight line in the absence of visual cues. In our experiments, distracted pedestrians rarely seemed to access the visual cues around them. Therefore, they might fail to execute collision avoidance behaviour in advance even if they were aware of oncoming people.”